At Bizzy Buddyz we offer home-based childcare services with offices and a large hall in Whakatāne and over 45 home-based sites across the Eastern Bay of Plenty. We joined Building Blocks in June 2019 and began our journey by looking at becoming Breastfeeding Friendly Accredited.

We set about creating a warm welcoming space at our Whakatāne building. We use this space often for our home-based community playgroups and wanted to also open it up for any local breastfeeding mothers to pop in if they needed to breastfeed. We put a policy to support breastfeeding in place and raised our staff and Educarers’ awareness about the building becoming breastfeeding friendly.

When we achieved our Breastfeeding Friendly Accreditation with Toi Te Ora we were provided with a large sign to display and a certificate. We also encouraged our  45 home-based spaces to support breastfeeding mothers and gave them the choice to request breastfeeding signage to display at their spaces.

To raise awareness in our community, we paid for an advert in our local ‘Beacon’ newspaper. We put a call out for mothers who were looking for an inviting place to breastfeed. Our advert noted that we were a breastfeeding friendly space accredited by Toi Te Ora and we invited mothers to use our warm and comfortable space to breastfeed and change their baby.

We really wanted to help normalise breastfeeding in public because we know this helps mothers to feel more comfortable and supported to breastfeed when they are out and about. We hope it will also raise awareness in our community about the role everyone has in supporting our breastfeeding mothers.